Notes

I set out to geek the heck out of Toronto's hippest geeks, and I did.
I showed them Emacs as they'd never seen it before--and even that was
a tiny fraction of my config. Lots of cool stuff behind the scenes,
too. When I showed them M-x doctor (the Emacs psychotherapist),
someone shouted out, "Is Emacs talking to you?" I laughed and
continued. What I *really* should've done was break the sequence of my
presentation, hook up the speakers, and tell them about Emacspeak -
presentation sequence be darned. ;) Oh, if they only knew how easy it
was to make jokes reality under Emacs! I remember writing my 'bot
implants' - the hippie-expand code I used to answer questions really
really quickly on IRC...

Anyway. That was FUN. And it was relatively easy to get through,
especially with the cue system I made (Emacspeak rocks!). I'll talk
about that some other time. It's a really cool hack and well worth exploring.

SO. The democamp.ca folks will eventually get
around to posting a vidcast. In the meantime, I have a 431MB MPEG
movie that I need to either downsample or cut up in order to put
online, maybe on YouTube. I don't have
enough memory or hard disk space to play around with this (have you
seen my computer?!), but I'll happily put the video up if we can
figure out how to go about doing that.

If you enjoyed the talk, missed it, or just want to hear/see me bounce
up and down about Emacs some more, come to the Linux Caffe
on Saturday (Oct 28, 2006) from 1:00 PM to 3:00 PM. I'll be there,
and we might even see about having some kind of mini-show / vidcast. I wonder if
David has a projector. =)

“I’m terrible at names,” complained my friend Steve. He’s a respected professor of
entomology who is fascinated by ugly bugs that make many of us shudder. “Really?” I
asked. “How many species of beetles can you identify by name?”

It's amazing, looking out over a crowd of some 70 people and realizing
that very few of them are strangers. It was my first
DemoCamp presentation. I
jumped at the opportunity to wear my beautiful white suit (I *love*
that outfit!), but neither the suit nor the stage (MaRS is big!)
imposed any distance whatsoever. It felt as if I was sitting around a
table with good friends who indulged me by listening to an
enthusiastic demonstration of my latest cool hacks.

It helped that there was a low table that I could put my computer on
so that I could do my demo without hiding behind the podium. (I hate
podiums and other things that stand between me and the rest of the
people!) The microphones were good, too. I left the podium microphones
in place, and my natural presenting voice was strong enough to get
picked up without effort. And of course, a warmed-up sympathetic crowd
was just *wonderful* to work with... =)

I can't wait to work on a few more things. A lower voice might be
easier to listen to, as long as I can still keep my warmth and humour.
A slightly higher table would've been nice. More structure for the
hacks, maybe a clearer message? But it was a fun presentation, and I'm
glad I got the chance to show people something crazy and fun.

I'd like to refine this presentation even further. I have an important
message I want to share with as many geeks as possible. I want people
to push the boundaries, to imagine what's possible when software can
be customized to that extent. Maybe the benefits will trickle down to
everyone else, the way wild ideas in research prototypes can be taken
into the mainstream...

Stymied by the sudden breakage in my mail setup, I racked my brain
for another way to get to the mail server in order to deliver my mail.
None of the shell accounts I had on other systems were active, and
none of the people I pinged were online.

I remembered that /etc/services was a list of well-known ports. If
mail.hosting.qsr.com.ph was listening on another standard port, that
would be a good place to find it. Searching this file for "smtp"
turned up port 25 (smtp) and port 465 (smtp over SSL).

A quick check confirmed that port 465 was accessible from my computer
even without tunneling.

All I had to do, then, was set up my mail system to use the new port.

I tried putting the port in directly. I also tried playing around with
the configuration, but I couldn't find a clear tutorial.

I used my Sony Cybershot digital camera to take a video of my
presentation at Democamp
last night. The file weighed in at 400+ MB! After a bit of trial and
error, I figured out how to use mencoder to crop to just me bouncing
up and down and talking excitedly about Emacs. =) Here's the
incantation I'm currently using:

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Page: 2006.10.24

Updated: 2006-10-2523:18:3723:18:37-0400

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